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politico.com opinion - BEN JORAVSKY

beethoven

Well-known member
see also social control tactic, delphi technique and alinsky method

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33526.html

James O'Keefe is Saul Alinsky in a funhouse mirror

By BEN JORAVSKY | 2/26/10 5:08 AM EDT

When I came to Chicago in 1981, Saul Alinsky had been dead for almost a decade. But his presence was everywhere.

Just about every neighborhood in this city of neighborhoods — black, white and Latino — had an Alinsky-style community organization run by Alinsky disciples, some even trained by the master himself.

They followed his tenets to a T, having all but memorized “Rules for Radicals” and “Reveille for Radicals,” his primers on organizing.

Alas, much of the Alinsky fervor has passed around here, as most local community activists now kiss up to Chicago’s all-powerful Mayor Richard M. Daley.

But apparently Alinsky lives in the hearts and souls of young right-wing activists, like James O’Keefe III and his cohorts.

Last month, O’Keefe and three others were arrested and charged with a federal felony, accused of attempting to tamper with the telephone system of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).

In 2008, O’Keefe and Hannah Giles made a name for themselves when they posed as a pimp and a prostitute and secretly filmed some staffers from the ACORN community group giving them tips on how to finance a brothel.

O’Keefe and his allies have reportedly been studying Alinsky for years, even getting together to discuss his books.

In reality, their antics don’t emulate Alinsky so much as Donald Segretti, the political operative for the Nixon White House, who went to prison for his role in forging letters ascribed to former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Edmund Muskie.

Despite his bad-boy reputation, Alinsky was not much of a lawbreaker. He went to the University of Chicago and received much of his funding from the Roman Catholic Church, unions and various philanthropic foundations.

He was a great character, though: funny, quick-witted, acerbic, street smart and irreverent. “I believe irreverence should be part of the democratic faith, because in a free society everyone should be questioning and challenging,” he once said. “If I had to put up a religious symbol the way some people have crucifixes, or stars of David, my symbol would be the question mark. A question mark is a plowshare turned upside down. It plows your mind so that thoughts and ideas grow.”

Basically, Alinsky took the tactics he learned from the 1930s labor movement and adapted them for community organizing. He had a vision of poor people transforming themselves and their communities through democratically run “people’s organizations.” He could get poetic about it, too — writing about ordinary “John Smith Americans” creating a “brilliantly lit, highly exciting avenue of hope.”

The leaders of his local movements would be organizers — who had, of course, studied his techniques in riling the masses. “The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentment of the people [and] fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overexpression,” Alinsky wrote in “Reveille.” “He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them.”

By the end of his life, in 1972, Alinsky, egged on by his followers, was talking about devising attention-grabbing schemes like a threatened “fart-in,” in which hundreds of protesters would eat baked beans and attend a concert.

In short, he had become a caricature of a kick-ass, take-no-prisoners rabble-rouser, maybe not unlike O’Keefe.

But I don’t think Alinsky would have gone in for O’Keefe, Giles and the rest. For one thing, they’re clearly too eager to make a name for themselves. Alinsky wanted his organizers to build organizations that would outlast them; he didn’t want them upstaging the larger group. As a rule, he wouldn’t let his organizers be quoted by name in the newspapers. The whole point was to let the people speak for themselves.

For another thing, by hammering away at Democrats, like Landrieu, the O’Keefe crowd is drifting too close to the Republican Party. Alinsky stayed out of politics. Most of his groups couldn’t endorse candidates without losing their tax-exempt status.

Finally, for better or for worse, Alinsky was a leftist. He divided the world into haves and have-nots. The whole point of rattling the cage, he insisted, was to force the haves into giving the have-nots a bigger slice of the pie. Because, he said, Lord knows, they wouldn’t give it up without a fight.

Still, I can see why O’Keefe and his buddies would want to emulate Alinsky. All that irreverence, conflict and controversy, his rhetoric about rubbing resentments and fanning flames. If I were a young rabble-rouser, I’d want to be like Alinsky, too.

Let’s face it. Young Republicans who want to look at least a little cutting edge don’t seem to have a whole lot of role models right now. There is Segretti, of course, but he ended up in jail.

Ben Joravsky, a staff writer for the Chicago Reader, has been covering Chicago politics for more than 25 years. He is co-creator of The Third City blog.
 

Steve

Well-known member
he has done a good job of exposing how badly some people can act and how far the organizations they belong to will go to protect pathetic employees..

James O'Keefe's statement on Teachers Unions placing "Fraternity before Morality"
Dec 14 2010

In the Project Veritas NJ Teachers Union video, NJ Union Chapter Presidents are candid about tenure abuse, profane about Govenor Chris Christie, and shocking in how they react to a teacher saying he sexually touched his students.

In the last video, "Teachers Unions Gone Wild", Passaic teacher Alissa Ploshnick was suspended for saying you "basically have to be in the hallway f***ing somebody" in order to lose tenure. She also relayed an incident about a fellow teacher you used a racial slur against a student, but was not fired. The Star-Ledger printed a correction in their rush to condemn the messenger. NJEA Spokesman Steve Wollmer initially falsely claimed the tapes were doctored and out of context, before more tapes were released.

NJEA spokesman Steve Wollmer called O'Keefe's videos a "complete fabrication" and "a calculated attack on [the NJEA] organization and its members". Wollmer said that the man who recorded Ploshnick "was offering her both romance and a glass of wine to get her to open up", and he called O'Keefe "flat-out sleazy"

Governor Chris Christie called the video "enlightening and enraging," adding, "this video is not about the things they say about me. This is video is about the things they say about themselves."

“He’s a bastard,” said Montclair Education Association President Marge Asterino about the NJ Governor. When undercover Reporter Christopher Heneghan asked about teachers abusing children, Bloomfield Education Association Vice-President Ann Post commented they would "absolutely" side with the teachers and added, "With all things the pendulum swings. So right now it's way over here as far as student rights."

The conversation with Annette Alston, President of the Newark Teachers Association, shows that she did the right thing in making it clear to our reporter that the union would not protect him in criminal circumstances. "If it's a criminal situation tenure is not going to mean anything." But the instinct of her then giving him strategic advice to put out a flame before it ignites into a fire, showcases the union putting fraternity before morality. While the video doesn't indicate illegal malfeasance, the moral and ethical vacancy of union culture is now on display.

do the liberals realize how sleazy they look when they defend someone who made a really stupid comment???
 
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